Because this has been one of the worst weeks in quite a while (reminiscent of the end of my junior year of high school) I cannot forge an original entry. Instead I have this. Bill Keller is the editor of The New York Times. Here he is answering a letter that came his way.
Colorful Leads
Q. The colorful lead is the bane (or at least one of the banes) of my time spent with The Times. So often, I have tried quickly to get the gist of a story (this happens in the Sports section more often than in the news sections) only to find that I must read something like "it was a dark and dreary night" before finding the point, or the score, or even a notion of what the article is about.
Whatever happened to the inviolate rule that a lead was 35 words or fewer, telling us where, why, what or who?
-- Peter C. Boulay, Bronx, N.Y.
A. As the sun blazed above the snow-lacquered peaks of the Hindu Kush, the weary editor flipped down his clip-on sunglasses and booted up his laptop.
It had been a long week, a soul-sapping, disorienting and yet strangely satisfying week.
Past the simple campsite where he awaited his digital connection to the modern world flowed all the human mystery of the East: the women shrouded in burqas of azure, or possibly cerulean, he was not too good on blues; the camel-borne warlords draped with belts of bullets; the shoeless boys in filthy "I Heart New York" T-shirts; and all the rest, all separated by semicolons and swaddled in colorful cliches.
The computer flickered to life. The keys clicked like castanets until up came a complaint from the northern part of a far-off metropolis at the eastern end of a troubled superpower. The editor read. He frowned. Then he squinted down at the keyboard and typed:
"Amen, Mr. Boulay. Amen."
There's something about Keller's jovial approach to a rather confrontational letter that you see so rarely today.
Daniel
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